“IN BEN BOYD’S DAY”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 March 1939, Page 8

“IN BEN BOYD’S DAY”

FINE STORY OF COLONIAL ADVENTURING. Brave days are recalled and made to live again by Mr Will Lawson in his latest book—“ln Ben Boyd’s Day.” This is a chronicle of commercial and other adventuring in New South Wales and elsewhere in tike Pacific in the ’forties and early ’fifties of last century. It is to be welcomed both as a rattling good yarn and for the clearlight it casts on picturesque and at times unedifying phases of early colonial history.

Benjamin Boyd was a wealthy adventurer who went out to Australia as the representative of a London syndicate. and with large funds at his disposal. in support of grandiose schemes of development. On his own account and on behalf of his company he became possessed of a fleet of ships, including a number of steamers and of enormous areas of pastoral country. At Twofold Bay he laid the foundations of what he hoped would be a city and seaport rivalling Sydney, but x of this place —Boydtown —only relics now remain. Although Boyd accomplished a great deal in banking, land and shipping enterprise, his schemes in the end collapsed. His failure and defeat were due not only to the opposition of those who resented any challenge to the supremacy of Sydney, but to his own rather obvious inability to appreciate human values. He appears to have placed working men in very much the same category as the materials they handled. If he had some progressive and constructive ideas, it must nevertheless stand to his lasting discredit that he was one of the pioneers of “blackbirding,” and dreamed of providing the labour force needed to develop Australia by bringing in indentured labourers from the Pacific islands. Little as he was entitled on some grounds to be held in pleasant and grateful memory, Benjamin Boyd was in his day a commanding and spectacular figure and in describing his career in Australia and his final voyage to the Solomons—he dreamt, after the failure of his hopes in Australia, of creating a federation of Pacific islands —Mr Lawson has found material for a colourful narrative which has interest on every page. Benjamin Boyd is only one of many noteworthy characters in the scenes and events which Mr Lawson sketches with bold and effective strokes. There are glimpses of the Sydney of the ’forties —a city then of some forty thousand people, intent already on living down its convict traditions and achieving great ambitions —of Van Diemen’s Land when Sir John Frankin was its Governor, of Hokianga, where Benjaman Boyd struck up a friendship with John Webster that was ended only by death, and of the Solomon Islands.

A gallant early episode, splendidly described, is a sea fight in Bass Strait in which Boyd’s fine schooner yacht, the Wanderer —armed and equipped like a man-of-war, and carrying a rich treasure to Sydney—beat off with ease the attack of a pirate brig. The ruffianly but hardy and’ intrepid whalers of the early days, the bullock drivers of the period—some of them as savage and lawless as the whalers—and others Who played their pioneering part all get their due share of attention in Mr Lawson’s entertaining and informative narrative. So, too, do the cultured folk who made their contribution, worthily or otherwise, to the life of the infant colony. Mr Lawson is to be congratulated upon the production of a bracing story of life in rude and strenuous days—a story that bears witness as definitely to sound and balanced judgment as to an eye for the romantic and picturesque. “In the Days of Ben Boyd’’ may be expected to win the wholehearted favour of readers young and old.

The book is published by the New Century Press Proprietary Ltd., of Sydney.